Mark 10:2-13
So, usually I like to have my sermons done by Wednesday or so, and I worked very hard to get this one done on Wednesday. I wrote a sermon using the Gospel lesson that talked about marriage and divorce. And after I wrote it, I read through it before I went home and realized it was the worst sermon I had ever written (at least bottom 3). So here it goes… Just kidding, I scrapped it and wrote another one on Friday. Why was it so bad? The main reason is because it wasn’t really supposed to be about marriage and divorce because or Gospel lesson, despite all appearances, isn’t really mainly about marriage and divorce.
It’s certainly not a list of rules for having a healthy marriage, or for when it’s OK to get a divorce. The Bible is very clear that God hates divorce (not say never reason for it, spouse is beating you, or harming the kids, or whatever). But God doesn’t celebrate when something he designed to last for a lifetime breaks apart. And if you have been through a divorce, you know exactly what God means. You feel God’s pain, and heartbreak over something that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped, or prayed, or imagined. And you certainly wouldn’t wish a divorce upon even your worst enemy.
So the sermon today isn’t about keys for a great marriage or anything like that. What we have before us is actually a very basic lesson about 2 different ways of approaching God. That’s what the Gospel lesson is actually about. And to make the point, God shows us two extremes, two groups of people in the ancient Middle East that couldn’t have been more opposite. In verses 2-12 we have the Pharisees, who were known for their brilliance, their wisdom, and their high and pious way of living. Then in verses 13-16 we have kids, small, not yet educated or wise, and totally dependent.
Each of these groups has a way of coming to Jesus. The Pharisees, with man-made way, rules, and knowledge, and impressive skills. And the kids, with a Holy-Spirit led way, totally reliant upon God, with nothing of earthly value to offer to him.
We start with the Pharisees. A group of these learned teaches come out to meet Jesus in Judea. Mark lets us know WHY they are coming, they want to test Jesus, or to trap him. I know what some of you are thinking, “Pastor, didn’t you just recently preach something like this, several times?” The answer is YES! The interaction between the Pharisees and Jesus is talked about all the time in the Gospels, and if the Bible talks about it a lot, I’m going to talk about it a lot too.
So what’s the killer question they have for Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” (Matthew adds, “For any and every reason”). Now as always, this may seem like a straightforward question, but it isn’t. It is a reference to a well documented debate going on in the Jewish community in Jesus day. There was a huge argument over how to interpret a rather obscure passage in the Old Testament Law in Exodus 24. I won’t read it here but the jist of it is that Moses said if a man gives a certificate of divorce to his wife for something indecent, and she remarries, and either gets divorced again, or the guy dies, she is NOT to go back to her first husband.
And this is the big debate. A Rabbi named Shammai, said that “indecency” should be interpreted to mean infidelity, so divorce should only come about if there was unfaithfulness. A Rabbi named Hillel said that, “indecency” could mean anything, and that a man could divorce his wife for any reason. (He mentions burning supper, not looking so hot, etc).
So we go back the question, and why they thought it was an airtight trap. If Jesus answers according to Shammai, they will come at him with Hillel. If he answers Hillel, they’ll hammer him with Shammai. And if Jesus says, never divorce, they will have the slam dunk case, saying, “Are you going against MOSES!” But these things never quite work out the way the Pharisees picture them working out. Because Jesus messes everything up by answering their question with a question, “What did Moses command you?” And they start to fall back on their heels, they said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.”
And Jesus leans into them, “And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
He says in essence, first off, the discussion isn’t about the divorce certificate. Moses let you issue those so there could be some semblance of order in the community, he didn’t say just because you are allowed to do it, that you should whenever you feel like it. And secondly, Jesus was offended at the nature of the discussion, because in arguing about the finer points of the Law, and trying to make a case for when it’s OK to get a divorce and when it’s not OK, they stopped seeing the big picture. Lost in 4 verses in Exodus, the stopped caring about Genesis.
He makes it clear that here you are working so hard, and getting so worked up about the issue of trying to make yourself feel better about divorcing your spouse, or how to make it easier to get a piece of paper that certifies your divorce, that you end up forsaking God’s call to see the blessing of marriage, or to honor marriage, or to work at lifting up marriage and being thankful for it. And instead of being heartbroken about divorce, or working on caring for people who have been hurt by divorce, or loving people who are having trouble in the marriages, you waste your time, by endlessly looking for loopholes, or technicalities, and ways of making yourself feel just fine about breaking this covenant relationship.
It’s a pumper truck approach. My best friend Dave, (Hey Dave if you’re listening) had a toy construction truck set when he was a kid. One of the trucks was a water pumper truck. He was playing outside, and he was going to fill the truck up again, and his mom said, “Don’t use the faucet to fill up that truck again.” So he obeyed, kind of. All I will say is that he didn’t use the faucet to fill up the truck, the rest you can figure out on your own. Anyways, he was concerned with technically following his mother’s directions, even though he knew what she really wanted.
The pumper truck approach is what the Pharisees took. They knew what God’s will and plan was for marriage. They knew that divorce should be a serious matter. But instead of working to honor God’s design, they wanted to find technicalities in the language that would allow them to do whatever they felt like, and to avoid confronting the reality of their own sinfulness and unrepentant hearts. They were working on trying to Justify themselves before God. In theological terms, to be Justified before God means simply to be pure, and holy and able to stand before him (Just-As-If I had no sin).
The Pharisees thought they could reach this state by their wisdom, and superior arguing skills, and finagling, they could work their way into the kingdom of God and stand before Him. Like I said at the beginning of the sermon, this lesson isn’t REALLY about divorce. But this is an extreme example that gets us to ask some hard questions of ourselves. Do I do this too? The answer for all of us is, “Yes you do.”
We too work hard at trying to justify ourselves before God, at making ourselves feel better about what we do or don’t do, even if we know deep down that we aren’t living up to the plans, and standards, and intent that God has for our lives. We try to JUSTIFY ourselves by focusing only on certain sins (pet sins) to draw attention away from what WE struggle with. It’s easy to condemn homosexual behavior, but what about the trash you were looking at on the internet? It’s easy to say, you shouldn’t abuse alcohol, but is it any less sinful to gossip about people that we know who do? We can condemn people who break into houses to steal and all the while we can hoard what we have and neglect to help people in need. Do I need to continue?
We try to JUSTIFY ourselves sometimes by using a sliding scale of sin. Yes I stole 2 cookies, but Frank stole 4, hey I’m twice as good as Frank! It doesn’t work that way. It also doesn’t work to try and Justify ourselves by trying to make up our own rules. Hillel tried it by making up new rules for divorce. Even churches try to make up new rules for what God says about sin, about sexuality, about marriage. It’s never a good idea!
If we approach God trying to justify ourselves, God’s response is always the same, He won’t see us Just-As-If we have no sin. He sees only according to his Law (Just-As-If we have no chance!). God relates to us with his Law and his Gospel. The Law is the message of the reality of God’s holiness and standards and how we fall desperately short of those. The Law points out our sins, and our hopelessness to stand on our own two feet before him. The Gospel is God’s reality of his love for us, shown to us on the cross, where he chooses to love us unconditionally, and undeservedly, in spite of our sins.
And God uses both. With his Law he afflicts the comfortable. With his Gospel he comforts the afflicted. So when we are stubborn in our sins, or trying to make our own way to God, or justifying ourselves. God isn’t going to say, “OK you win, I guess I’ll let these sins slide.” NO, he will afflict us with the hammer of the Law. No, I will not be OK with your sin. No, you cannot stand before me. No, you cannot come to me with that hard heart. It’s a terrifying thing to be afflicted by the Law. At times, we all are!
And when we are afflicted, there are only 2 things we can do. We can reject God’s calling and an act like the Pharisees, and turn even deeper into ourselves and make more rules, and more arguments, and more laws. Or, thank God, there is another response, the response the Holy Spirit leads us to. To stop fighting God. To say what He has to say about our sins (definition of Confession). To say, YES, I am sinful, I have fallen short, I’m not living the way you’ve called me or designed me to live, without you God I am without help, and without hope.
And this kind of response is what we learn about in the last part of the Gospel lesson. It’s a lesson that God teaches us by means of children. We think of kids as precious, and cute, and all that, and in the ancient world they did too. But mostly in the ancient world, little children were not the focus of life, but were thought of mostly in terms of their dependence and their inabilities. We see this in how the disciples respond to them. “And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them.” Don’t bring those kids in here right now, Jesus has IMPORTANT stuff going on. But Jesus has none of it, he says, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.
This is picture of how the Spirit leads us to come to Jesus. The Spirit will be harsh with the Law sometimes. He will open us up to the reality of our sin, and our need for God, our inability to right what we’ve wronged. But He does so in order to steer us to the beautiful reality of the Gospel. Where Christ himself comforts us, and embraces us, and blesses us. Where Christ points us away from our sins, and to the love that he showed us on the cross, where he died for our sins, and paid the price we were so hopelessly helpless to pay. Christ wraps us up in his love and we find that we have a refuge in him that we don’t have in ourselves. This is what the Kingdom of God is all about.
We enter God’s Kingdom, not like warriors, or scholars, or kings. We enter God’s kingdom like children, with nothing to offer Him, with empty hands, with only our dependence, our repentance. The Doors to heaven swing only on the twin hinges of the cross and the empty tomb, and by God’s grace they swing wide for us.
So where are you this morning? Maybe you are in need of some help in your relationships, maybe even your marriage. And you need to let go of being so concerned with being technically right, and regain the bigger picture of God’s design and desire for you and your relationships. It might be time for you to admit that you are helpless and come to Christ for forgiveness. Maybe it’s time to stop arguing and ask your spouse, or family member or friend for forgiveness. Maybe it’s time to you to finally forgive someone else.
Maybe there is something else altogether. Is there something that keeps bothering you, that you are doing mental gymnastics to explain away. To try and say there is a good reason why I did this, or didn’t do that! But God won’t stop afflicting you with the Law. Maybe it’s time to agree with Him, to repent of your sin, to admit you need God’s help and experience the wonder of His grace and mercy instead of the heartbreak and fatigue of fighting God.
Maybe it’s just the opposite. That you HAVE confessed your sin to God, but YOU won’t let it go. You have refused Christ’s comfort, maybe for years, you’ve fought against the comfort of the Gospel and the love of God. We waste so much precious time thinking about how we’re not good enough, or haven’t done enough, or that God could never possibly love me. It’s time to stop the fight. To the face the reality that God has forgiven you, and loves you, and that the cross is enough. Today, honor God by letting go of what he has long since forgotten about.
In the end, wherever you are, Thank God. Thank God that you don’t stand or fall before him because of a technicality, or an argument, or anything that you’ve done. But you stand before Him because of Him. And because of his Suffering, and Death, and Resurrection, His kingdom is opened, even to you. So receive God’s Kingdom like a child. Because that’s what you are, HIS Child.
AMEN
